New computer architecture can often offer debatable performance benefits at launch time. We look at what speed-up Intel's i7-4770K offers over 3770K as well as the integrated HD Graphics performance. Haswell's CPU architecture delivers what was predicted, moderate performance improvement with significant power savings, i7-4770K achieving 40 watts at idle and 15 watt reduction in CPU loads.

Despite these CPU improvements it is the updated graphics performance that provides shock and awe. Haswell's integrated 'GT2' HD Graphics 4600 GPU delivers one-third to half the performance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX460. Has Intel has finally delivered on its promise of better graphics? With such promises in tech land, the more things change the more they stay the same. Read on to find out why and more detail on Haswell's Desktop performance.

Background

Technical details surrounding Intel's 4th generation 'Core' Processor, codenamed 'Haswell' have been known to the industry for a few years now as is the nature of Intel's gradual disclosure of technical details as it progresses through its development cycle for its new processor architectures. What has been not known was how these new technologies would be implemented into the final product. Power savings, new instruction sets, changes to the platform chipset/mainboard, enthusiast tuning features and so on.

Much hype, hope, praise and controversy was put on Haswell and its successor Broadwell during the past 2 years especially with regard to its mobile versions and graphics capability and performance.

It is easy to be cynical of promises in the hi-tech sector especially given past performances but if it is one thing that can be banked on in the computer industry is never ever underestimate Intel. Other vendors may be first to deliver a technology to customers such as AMD but Intel has always taken the long road and tried to deliver an optimal and robust feature set. Intel's delay to implement USB 3.0 is a good example of this, despite being shrouded by controversy.

But Haswell does bring tangible improvements, however the bulk of these will me more noticeable on mobile devices.